Dead Storage
Page 3
The doctor waved his hand. “We don’t need anything from you or the police at this point. Amy needs treatment codes to fill all the appropriate administrative boxes on the UC Davis lab forms.”
He turned to his assistant. “Amy, I’ll phone up to Davis myself. Can you call the Santa Clara County District Attorney’s office and see if they know anything about recent crimes involving a dog of Munchkin’s description or anything near a Chinese restaurant?”
Amy stood quickly and left, but not before she gave my shoulder a comforting squeeze. Dr. Davidson stood and took the clipboard containing the paperwork from my hand. “I know Jason and Stephen pretty well,” he said. “I’m not worried about getting paid. And I’ll make sure Davis has whatever they need for the proper chain-of-evidence documentation. I need to get back to work, but I don’t want you to worry about any of this. Have Stephen phone me when he gets in touch, will you please? We’ll take good care of Munchkin. If you can’t get hold of Stephen . . . Well, never mind about that. Your instincts are good. There’s no doubt in my mind this is a criminal case. Someone went after that dog with a knife and beat him with a blunt object.”
He drew a sharp breath in through his teeth. “I hope Stephen isn’t badly hurt. I don’t understand how anyone could get close enough to injure Munchkin unless Stephen had already been incapacitated and unable to prevent the attack. I wish he’d get in touch.”
It was my turn to reassure the vet. “I’m sure Stephen will call soon. He’s resilient. If necessary, Munchkin can stay with my family for as long as he needs to.” I gathered up my backpack and Belle’s leash, not exactly sure where we’d go from here. It seemed like hours since I’d set off for Stephen’s this morning, planning to get a huge chunk of accumulated clutter sorted and organized. But the whole day had fallen apart since then. I said a quick good-bye and thanks to Dr. Davidson and left the building by the same door I’d entered. My car was right where I’d left it.
I let Belle into the back seat. She hopped in promptly, but I gagged and nearly lost the sandwich the vet had so generously shared. An hour or so of baking in the sun had done nothing to improve the smell of the evidence that had transferred from Munchkin to my car seats.
I rolled down the windows, knowing that my next stop should probably be a car wash and detailer. But they were almost certain to ask questions I couldn’t answer. And after all the uncertainties of the morning, I wanted to be home. I started the car, hoping that I could at least organize my own whirling thoughts and figure out what my next step would be. If only Stephen would call.
My phone rang before I got home. I pulled to the side of the road to answer it.
“Hello?” I said, but was met by silence. “Hello?” I was about to hang up.
“Maggie, thank goodness I found you. It’s Paolo. Do you have time to meet me?”
“Stephen Laird isn’t with you by any chance, is he? Jason and I have both been trying to reach him all day. He was a no-show for a meeting we had this morning. It’s not like him. Not at all.” I started to tell Paolo about my adventures with Munchkin, but my voice broke. I shivered as the impact from the morning’s events settled in. I swallowed and began again. “I’m on my way home now. Can you come to dinner?”
“I need to see you right away. Someplace people can’t overhear us. The dog park?”
I thought for a minute and looked at the time on the car’s dashboard. It was nearly two thirty and school would be letting out soon. I didn’t have much time. But Paolo was a friend of the family and Jason’s partner at the Orchard View Police Department. If he said he needed to see me, I knew a meeting was essential.
“I’m too far away. What about Starbucks or the bakery in the old train station?”
“The train station would work. Outside, maybe? There won’t be many people there at this hour.”
“Can you look into whether there’ve been any accidents? Could Stephen be in the hospital? I don’t mean to be a fear monger, but I’m running out of upbeat reasons for him to be out of touch this long.”
“We can talk about that over coffee. See you in a few?”
I agreed to meet him, but warned him that we’d have to talk quickly so that I could leave to pick up the kids from school. As I drove across town, I wondered what he had to say that couldn’t wait until the dinner hour or be communicated over the phone. Come to think of it, it wasn’t like Paolo to disagree with anyone else’s suggestions or refuse an invitation to dinner. He was the most nonconfrontational police officer I’d ever met, and he hated to cook for himself.
We arrived at the same time and requested plain old-fashioned brewed coffee to speed the process. Paolo shifted from one foot to another as the barista filled our orders. “You’re like a flea on a griddle,” I told him as we took our cups to a rapidly cooling patio where our voices were drowned out by passing traffic.
“What’s up?” I assumed a light tone to make Paolo more comfortable. I guessed he wanted my advice on how to handle a social situation. If it were about work, Paolo would have talked to Jason, not me. And social nuances were not easy for him to interpret, manage, or understand.
“It’s about Stephen.” Paolo looked from one side of the patio to the other, shifting in his chair and nervously turning his coffee mug by its handle.
“Stephen? You know where he is?” I leaned back in my chair and smiled. “I’m so glad to hear he’s okay.”
Paolo held his coffee mug with two hands and lifted it shaking to his lips. He swallowed hard and set the cup down. Opened his mouth to speak and closed it again. Something was wrong. Paolo looked like he’d rather be anywhere than here, even though he’d insisted on meeting me.
“Has something happened? Where is Stephen? Is he hurt?” I normally tried not to fire question after question at Paolo. It confused him and he got stuck trying to decide which question to answer first. He wasn’t stupid. He was brilliant, in fact, and a huge asset to the Orchard View Police Department. But his brain didn’t work the same way that mine did and my rapid-fire delivery of questions wasn’t the best way to get information from him. I tried again.
“Tell me what you need me to know.”
Paolo relaxed, but only a bit. He leaned forward and whispered, “Stephen’s in jail.”
I gasped and bit my lip, forcing myself to ask one follow-up question at a time.
“What do you know?”
“Mostly nothing. He was arrested very early this morning but hasn’t talked to the police or anyone else. He was picked up in Mountain View. They can hold him for two days. After that they’ll need to charge him and send him to the county jail in San Jose.”
Again, I sorted through all the questions I wanted to blurt out and selected the one least likely to derail Paolo’s thought processes. “What can I do?”
“Visit him. As soon as possible. You’re the only one he’ll talk to. The only one who can help.”
I frowned and squinted at Paolo, trying to make sense of what I was hearing.
“How do you know all this?”
Paolo made a sound that was halfway between a low-volume scream and a growl. “One of the guys on duty at the jail last night went through the academy with Jason. He recognized Stephen and wanted to let Jason know. He phoned the station. Because Jason’s in Texas, the call forwarded to me.”
“Why wouldn’t Stephen talk to Jason? Or this friend of Jason’s at the jail? Or you? Why me?”
“Maggie, please. I don’t know. I don’t know anything.” He cleared his throat and lowered his hands to his sides, shaking them as if trying to loosen all his muscles at once. He looked at a corner of the patio and recited in a monotone as if he was reading from a whiteboard filled with notes. “Mountain View Police picked him up late last night after getting an anonymous tip about a possible murder at a Chinese restaurant called the Golden Dragon. The restaurant owner was discovered dead in the cold-storage room and Stephen was found covered with blood, wiping down tables and chairs. No one else was there.”
“Once they figured out that Stephen wasn’t badly injured, they took him to the station. But he won’t answer any of their questions. His fingerprints were found, along with someone else’s on a knife in the alley behind the restaurant where there were some puddles of blood and bloody footprints going every which way.”
“Were any of them dog footprints?”
Paolo furrowed his brow and stared at me. “How do you know that?”
“Never mind. What does Stephen want? What can I do? Have you called Jason? Someone must have witnessed something. Who called it in? How did they call it in? Did they know someone had been killed or had they overheard a fight? We could tell so much if we knew about the phone call.”
Paolo sighed. I knew better than to pelt him or anyone else with my long lists of questions. But they had a tendency to spill out, unbidden, in an overwhelming torrent that put most people on the defensive. “I’m sorry, Paolo. Go on. Please, tell me what you know.”
“That’s the problem. Stephen will only say that no one should call Jason. They’ve tried to call him anyway, but calls aren’t getting through to the disaster area and no one wants to send bad news in a text. Jason told me not to call him under any circumstances because the phone systems in the flood zone are already so overloaded. The Mountain View Police let me talk to Stephen. I guess they hoped he would tell me what happened, but he just asked me to phone you. He said he’ll talk to you, only to you, and only if you promise not to speak to Jason.”
I pushed my hair back from my forehead and sighed. “This is getting weirder by the minute. Why would he want to talk to me and not Jason? It makes no sense.” I shook my head. “But that doesn’t matter right now, I guess. How do I see him? How soon can I see him? Does he have a lawyer? Does he need a lawyer? Do I need to get him one?”
“Visiting him will have to wait until 9:00 a.m. tomorrow morning. I don’t know the answers to your other questions. This isn’t a situation they prepare you for at the police academy.”
Chapter 3
The self-storage industry in the United States generates some $30 billion in annual revenue. Most of us have too much stuff. Some of us spend more on storage than we might spend if we discarded everything we own and re-purchased only what we need.
From the Notebook of Maggie McDonald, Simplicity Itself Organizing Services
Friday, February 17, Morning
First thing the next morning after dropping David at the high school and Brian at middle school, I headed to downtown Mountain View. I inevitably became enmeshed in the heavy traffic crossing the Peninsula to get to Google, LinkedIn, Facebook, and dozens of other high-tech companies.
After dodging pedestrians glued to their cell phones, cyclists wearing earbuds, and drivers who were shaving, applying mascara, or pretending they weren’t texting, I sandwiched myself between two little white Google self-driving cars. The rounded cars sported silver rooftop bubbles that held much of their sensing gear, making them resemble the sugar bowl from my grandmother’s fine china tea set. But I knew I could rely on their driving. They never grew distracted, angry, or tired, and they always followed the rules of the road.
I relaxed and surrendered to the tedium as we crawled along like a millipede with hundreds of mismatched segments. I tried to use the time productively, focusing on what I would say to Stephen. But that made me worry about what might be involved in visiting the jail. I had no idea how long it would take, what paperwork I’d need to fill out, nor what sort of condition Stephen might be in. Had he been hurt, like Munchkin? Had he received medical attention? How was he coping with being locked up when his ongoing struggle with PTSD forced him to walk miles daily with Munchkin’s comforting support?
I’d talked it over with my husband, Max, the night before. He didn’t like the idea of me spending time at the jail with Stephen or anyone else. Eventually, we were able to agree that I would make one visit to try to learn what had happened and what kind of help Stephen would need. After that, we’d get someone with more expertise to disentangle Stephen from whatever mess he was caught up in.
I’d watched enough television that I thought I was prepared. To breeze through the metal detectors, I wore my sports bra instead of an underwire and leggings instead of zippered jeans with rivets. I wore clog-type sneakers with no metal eyelets, and a long modest tunic dress. I’d removed my earrings, watch, and wedding ring, and carried only my driver’s license, passport, and keys.
Despite a wide array of helpful English and Spanish directional signs displayed throughout the parking lot, I wasn’t entirely sure how to get to the jail. Squaring my shoulders and pretending to a confidence I didn’t feel, I embraced my ignorance of procedures and asked for help at the main entrance to the police department. Introducing myself to the uniformed desk officer, who sported a French-braided ponytail streaked in teal and magenta, I told her I wasn’t sure where I needed to go.
“Good morning, Mrs. McDonald,” she said, giving me a warm and welcoming smile. “Paolo Bianchi from Orchard View PD told us you’d be coming in this morning. I think they’re all ready for you. Let me call back and check. Have a seat. Would you like some coffee? A local boutique roasting company is treating us to their service this month. It’s pretty good—not the normal burned and overaged cop-shop blend.”
Flustered by her welcome when I’d expected something much grimmer, I sat on the edge of one of the brightly colored and surprisingly comfortable chairs. Officer French Braid held up one finger and spoke into the mouthpiece loudly enough for me to easily overhear. “Mrs. McDonald is here to see Stephen Laird.” She smiled, winked at me, and nodded. “Yes, ma’am, right on time. Do you want to talk to her first, or should I send her on back?”
She made a few more cheerful remarks into the receiver, laughed, replaced the phone in its cradle, and turned back to me. “Detective Joan Smith will be out in a second. Grab some coffee and take it with you. There are go-cups on the left of the machine there.”
I’d finished pouring my coffee just as Officer French Braid looked up at the door, smiled, and stood.
“Morning, Joan. Mrs. McDonald, this is Detective Smith. Joan Smith—like Smith and Jones—her whole name screams ‘made-up alias,’ but it’s real, I promise.”
Detective Smith crossed the room, smiling. I stood to meet her, though I was still unsettled by the homey friendliness exuded by everything and everyone I’d encountered so far. For some reason I couldn’t quite explain, the detective’s gentle demeanor made me wary. I feared her manner was a calculated ploy to throw me off guard and trick me into revealing information about Stephen that he’d prefer to keep secret. I tried to shake off my feelings as I suspected they were unwarranted. Chances were they sprang from watching too many cop shows or reading too many murder mysteries.
“Good morning, Mrs. McDonald. We’re glad you’re here. We’re hoping you can answer some questions for us so we can make sure that your friend Mr. Laird gets the care he needs.”
“Care? Is he injured? Has he seen a doctor? Should he be in the hospital?” My voice wavered and my hands shook. “You know I’m here at Stephen’s request, right? Not as a witness. I have no idea what’s going on and I don’t think I can help you.”
Detective Smith was tall, thin, poised, and pleasant. She held the door for me and smiled.
“Please relax, Mrs. McDonald. May I call you Maggie? I understand that you’re here to visit Mr. Laird and we’re going to make that happen. We haven’t arrested him and he hasn’t been charged.”
I nodded when she asked if she could call me Maggie. “Paolo Bianchi from the Orchard View Police Department said that Stephen was going to be transferred to the county jail in San Jose and that I needed to get down here fast. Was he wrong about that?”
Joan bit her lip. “The district attorney is looking into the possibility of charging him with obstructing a
police investigation and any one of a number of other offenses up to and including murder.” I gasped, but Joan leaned toward me and whispered, “Between you and me, I think it’s unlikely that he’ll find a judge to sign off on any of it.”
She straightened and spoke more firmly. “Look, I know you’ll feel better once you see and can talk to Stephen. Let’s get you two together and I’ll follow up with you later. Sound like a plan?”
I nodded again. My mouth was dry and I could think of nothing to say. I wasn’t equipped with the vocabulary required for visiting a friend being held at the police station—whether he was under arrest or not.
Joan led me into a small room, maybe ten feet by twelve. Though it was softly lit and held a sofa, a coffee table, and two cushioned armchairs, no one would mistake it for a living room. I took a seat and experienced the same sense of foreboding and restlessness that I felt as a child in the principal’s office or waiting for an uncomfortable dental procedure. I reminded myself that I was here for Stephen, because he’d asked me to be and because I was his friend. But my legs and shoulders tensed as I fought the urge to run.
On one wall was a large whiteboard with incompletely erased markings in four colors. Opposite that was a window framed by curtains and covered with mini-blinds. It looked suspiciously like the mirrored windows I was familiar with from TV and movies, and I was tempted to investigate it more closely and tap on the glass.
“Make yourself comfortable. Is there anything you need?” Joan asked. I shook my head, but then I leaned forward, tilting my body toward the fake window and then at a discrete camera painted the same tasteful cream as the walls and ceiling.
“Will this be a private meeting with Stephen?”
“I’ll get him for you,” she said, dodging my question.
A chill settled over me as I reminded myself that although Joan was being considerate, she wasn’t here to offer me tea and cookies or anything else, no matter what she said or how she acted. She was here to investigate what Paolo had said was a homicide. And she was legally entitled to lie to me and to Stephen.